Book briefs: The best bookstores in the world

Word on the Water, a London book barge
London's Word on the Water bookstore is located on a floating barge on one of the city's canals.
David Skinner via Creative Commons

Welcome to your weekly roundup of book news and literary highlights from The Thread.

This week, readers name their favorite bookstores around the world, and the paper bags from Chipotle end up in Yale's library archives.

Best bookstores in the world

Create a More Connected Minnesota

MPR News is your trusted resource for the news you need. With your support, MPR News brings accessible, courageous journalism and authentic conversation to everyone - free of paywalls and barriers. Your gift makes a difference.

Bookstores were hit hard in the recession, but they've bounced back with a plucky resolve. Small corner shops and city block-sized bookstores are still serving millions of readers, even with the growing draw of Amazon and e-readers.

Last week, The Guardian asked readers to recommend the best indie bookstores in the world, and the results will make book lovers drool. From a book barge that roams a London canal to an old theater-turned-shop in Buenos Aires, the spaces are each one of a kind.

The Wild Rumpus bookstore in Minneapolis
At the Wild Rumpus bookstore in Minneapolis, a canoe on the ceiling captures the imagination.
Courtesy of Wild Rumpus

Wild Rumpus, in Minneapolis, made the list at No. 7. Specializing in children's books, Wild Rumpus is part bookshop, part menagerie. Three cats and two chickens roam the aisles — and when you're ready to check out, a tarantula named Thomas Jefferson is waiting at the counter. There's also a chinchilla, a ferret and two rats who live under the floorboards in a glass cage.

Chipotle bags as literary masterpieces

Toni Morrison's contribution to Chipotle's cups
Toni Morrison was one of the many authors whose work was published on Chipotle's paper cups.
Courtesy of Chipotle

Last year, burritos went literary when Chipotle started printing prose on its paper bags and cups. Jonathan Safran Foer, author of "Everything Is Illuminated," pioneered the program with the fast food chain.

The idea came to Foer when he got bored while eating a burrito and realized he had no reading material.

Now, readers can enjoy the work of Foer, Augusten Burroughs, Julia Alvarez, Barbara Kingsolver, Aziz Ansari and more while they chow down on beans (pinto or black?). It's estimated that up to 800,000 people a day could be reading the bags and cups.

And now, thanks to Yale University, the works won't just be lost in the trash. Chipotle donated the "first editions" to the Yale Collection of American Literature, which collects American literature in all formats and media — although a paper cup is probably a new one.

Saving Hemingway's home in Cuba

The study of Finca Vigia, Hemingway's Cuban home
A bookshelf and hunting souvenirs in the study of the Finca Vigia colonial residence, where Ernest Hemingway lived for 21 years.
AFP/Getty Images 2007

Ernest Hemingway made his home just outside Havana from 1939 to 1960 at the Finca Vigia estate. It was there that he wrote "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "The Old Man and the Sea."

The home is now one of Cuba's most popular tourist attractions, but American preservationists are worried that the writer's papers are at risk. After Hemingway's suicide in 1961, the Cuban government took control of the home, allowing Hemingway's wife Mary to remove only a few items. Most of the home's contents, including Hemingway's extensive library, were left behind.

The Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation warned that Hemingway's papers and books are "slowly disintegrating in the baking heat and dripping humidity of the sprawling home."

Now, with renewed relations between the two countries, the foundation will be able to send $900,000 in supplies to build a preservation lab.

According The New York Times, it will the U.S.'s first major export of construction materials to Cuba under the recently relaxed trade embargo.